Her Tea Party: What Margaret Thatcher Really Meant to England and the World

Amid
all the suffocating claptrap celebrating Margaret Thatcher in the media, only
the British themselves seem able to provide a refreshing hit of brisk reality.
Over here, she is the paragon of principle known as the "Iron Lady,"
devoted to freedom, democracy and traditional values who bolstered the West
against encroaching darkness. Over there, she is seen clearly as a class
warrior, whose chief accomplishments involved busting unions and breaking the
post-war social contract.

Promoting
the economic doctrines of the far right—whose eager acolytes in the tea party
today revere her—Thatcher helped to hasten the decline of the venerable English
village whose values she claimed to represent. "There is no better course
for understanding free-market economics than life in a corner shop," she
once wrote, recalling her upbringing in the little grocery store that her
father operated in the town of Grantham. But as a left-leaning British writer
observed acidly, her "free-market" policies "led to the
domination of small-town life by supermarkets and other powerful
corporations."

In
the hometown she left behind, factories were shuttered and coal mines closed,
owing to her policies—which may be why not so long ago, the vast majority of
the town's residents expressed opposition to erecting a bronze statue of her.

Indeed,
much as she emphasized her humble roots—a theme echoed constantly in the
American media—the less romantic fact is that Thatcher's path to 10 Downing
Street was paved with the fortune of her husband Denis Thatcher, a millionaire
businessman. It was not an image that matched her self-portrait as a
hardworking grocer's daughter, but it turned out to be the template for the
policies she pursued as prime minister—cracking down hard on unruly workers,
cutting aid to the poor (even milk for children) and privatizing public
services for better or worse, but always to the benefit of the financial class.

At
the same time that she and her ideological companion Ronald Reagan were
smashing labor on both sides of the Atlantic, with lasting consequences for
equality and democracy, they voiced support for workers in Eastern Europe,
where unions rose up against Stalinism and Soviet domination. Workers' rights
were to be defended in the East and abrogated in the West.

Three
decades later, her ideological heirs continue to prosecute class warfare
against public and private sector workers, seeking to deprive them of the same
rights that she and Reagan supposedly held sacrosanct in communist Poland. To
fulfill the Thatcherite crusade against organized labor, America's tea party
governors are now undermining and virtually abolishing the right to unionize in
their states.

The
justification for this sustained assault on working families, then and now, was
to prevent inflation and promote economic growth. Yet the result of Thatcher's
policies was unemployment that hovered around 10% during most of her rule, and
inflation that remained around 5%. Hardly a roaring success, even when measured
against the current weak recovery.

Thatcher:
Mandela Was a ‘Terrorist’

In
a statement released by the White House, President Obama said that her death
meant the loss of "one of the world's great champions of freedom and
liberty"—a peculiar tribute from the first black U.S. president,
considering that Thatcher, like Reagan, defended the apartheid regime in South
Africa from its Western critics.

She
opposed the release from prison of Nelson Mandela, the leader of the African
National Congress who later became South Africa's first democratically elected
president, referring to him as a "terrorist." In 1984, she reversed
longstanding British foreign policy by hosting a state visit by white South
African president P.W. Botha. And although she defeated Argentina's military
junta in the Falklands War, Thatcher befriended the Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet—even inviting him to her home in England when he was under
investigation for human rights atrocities.

Here
in America, at least, the pap mythology surrounding Thatcherism—its putative
successes and purity of purpose—contrasts with the reality of a cruel and
contradictory ideology whose malignant impact lives on without its namesake.